urn

UK/ɜːn/US/ɝn/

nounB2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,047 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: urns

An urn is a tall rounded vase, often with a lid. A funeral urn, a Greek urn, ashes in an urn.

The commonest modern use is for ashes after cremation, and there is no law in most countries about where they may be kept. A tea urn is a large heated container. Keats wrote an ode to a Grecian one. The Latin urna means a vessel.

Definitions of urn

1nounurnA tall rounded vase, often with a lid.B2+
“A large stone urn full of flowers stood on each side of the steps.”

urn is a vessel.

Where it comes from

Latin urna means a vessel, possibly from a root meaning to burn, since urns held ashes.

Proto-Indo-European
*h₁ews-
Latin
urna — vessel
Old French
urne
Middle English
urne
English, today
urn

From Middle English urne, from Old French urne, from Latin urna (“vessel”). a doublet of urna.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Containers & Packaging

Practise this word

urn in the wild

After England won two of the three Tests on the tour, a small urn was presented to Bligh at Melbourne.
The Ashes
A Uniform Resource Name (URN) is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that uses the urn scheme.
Uniform Resource Name
An urn is a vase, often with a cover, with a typically narrowed neck above a rounded body and a footed pedestal.
Urn
In catering, large vessels for serving tea or coffee are often called "tea-urns", even when they are metal cylinders of purely functional design.
Urn
The sculpture is based on drawings that have survived of an urn designed by Alexander Pope for a friend's garden at Hagley Hall, Worcestershire.
Pope's Urn

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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urn